24 Hours of Le Mans Open Thread
Not sure how many people here are paying attention to the 24 Hours of Le Mans today and tomorrow, especially with all the World Cup action today, but I know there are a lot of high level racing fans that post here and I wanted to create a place to talk about the race, if anyone is interested.
What: 24 Hours of Le Mans
Where: Circuit de la Sarthe, Le Mans, France
When: 9:00am Saturday to 9:00am Sunday
What to Look For: Whether Audi can reclaim its dominance after Peugeot ended Audi's five year winning streak last year. Peugeot absolutely ran away from Audi in qualifying, but as usual, the issue for Peugeot will be durability.
What Else to Look For: Whether Corvette can carry over its dominance of LMGT1 into its change of classification this year to LMGT2 and displace Ferrari Risi Competzione atop LMGT2. Qualification was close between the two.
Why You Should Care: It's the oldest sports car endurance race in the world. The course is 8.469 miles long with 21 turns and cars will (at times) exceed 200mph. The winning car will travel over 3,000 miles during the 24 hour race.
Why Else You Should Care: The technology used in these cars helps develop the technology you'll see in production automobiles in the future (e.g. Audi's TDI).
Televisions Schedule: Live action today on Speed from start to 12:30pm and then after a break, the rest of the race from 6:00pm tonight to 9:30am tomorrow morning.
Observations So Far: So far Audi and Peugeot look consistent (as usual) in LMP1and Corvette looks good (as usual) in LMGT2. One of the Ford GT1's took a pretty nasty early crash.
Thanks for the reminder! I've only been focused on F1 Montreal this weekend, but this is just another great way to spend some time this weekend. Can't wait for coverage to resume at 6:00 pm.
Peugeot even through they're leading as we approach 14 hours to go, have been looking a bit rough at times. Lost a car in the first few hours, and even Audi has run into a bit of bad luck. The Corvettes are looking the class of the GT2 field at the moment after the Ferrari took the lead early in the race. If you can survive the night at LeMans, you have a fighting chance come morning.
You're definitely not alone. My wife and I are huge fans. We've never made it to Le Mans, but this is the first year that we haven't made it to Sebring.
This post shows one of the greatest things about this race. Peugeot and the Corvette looked like world beaters for more than half of the race, but at the end none of them will find the podium. I don't think anyone could have honestly expected Audi to finish one, two, three. Hard to believe that three of the four Peugeots broke with the same problem. Just goes to show you that the fast car doesn't win at Le Mans, the strong car does, and Audi has that down pat.
The R15 sure is a sweet car. That picture is from Sebring, I believe. You can check out the R15 that won today, which has a pretty different design than that one, at Road Atlanta in the fall.
The remaing factory Peugeot (at the time) ran the Corvette off the road going into the Porsche Curves... The team did a heck of a job getting that car back onto the track, but that's LeMans for you.
Peugeot got suckered into running a qualifying pace by the Audis pushing them all night that eventually cooked the engines of the remaining 2 cars left in the race. I'm not a huge Audi fan, but you have to give credit when its due.
I'm thinking I may make the trek to LeMans next year, I'm trying to see if I can get a decent size group of people to go. It would be one hell of an experience.
We've talked about going, too, actually, but we're not exactly positive on what the viewing quality of the event will be. We've been sort of spoiled with the experience at Sebring. In other words, I'm not sure what the actual race viewing experience is there in person as opposed to just experiencing an event. If that makes sense. That said, it would still be beyond awesome just to go and experience the event in person.